Consider voluntary “permadeath” playings of games (Keogh2013a), in which a player agrees to the new rule that theywill stop playing a game entirely if they die. This enormouslyintensifies all violent acts in play by restoring a sense of riskand mortality to each moment. Various games have sought tofold this spirit of play into their rules with some success, fromDayZ’s literal permadeath to the punishing grind of Dark Souls,making them a more consequential experience of violence.I’ll end with a hopeful note care of my game design idol,Robert Yang. There are seeds of something very powerful in hisgame Hurt Me Plenty. In it a violent act—striking someone—isreframed by the intimate and erotic world of BDSM. Yang’sdecision to have a cool-down period for the virtual partner torecover is both tender and an acknowledgment of the physi-cality of the act.

Contemporary controllers have buttons called “triggers”for a reason: shooting is one of the more common actions

From the formal technicalities of parameters tothe warm glow of a sunset across a limpid pool, virtual wateris both technology and story, code and emotion. Most of all,in a gallery setting you can appreciate the water itself, withoutthe distraction of having somewhere else to be or someoneelse to kill.You may find your understanding of real, wet water chang-ing too. When I returned to my hometown of Wellington,New Zealand for a visit after making the game, I sat by its har-bor and stared into the water. I watched caustics I only knewthe name of thanks to making a video game; I blinked intothe dazzling reflections of the sun; I thought about the “pro-cessing power” of physics itself, capable of such refractive bril-liance.

Computation is a key part of how a game means what itmeans.

Long after you have moved on, if you have been kindenough to leave your computer on and the game running,CPU Sisyphus will push ever onward, making computationafter computation on that infinite hill (see figure 3.6).CODA: THE VIEW FROM THE BOTTOMVideo games, or, perhaps more to the point, computer games,are fundamentally made of computation. The system runninga game, whether it’s a PC, a PlayStation, or a pocket calculator,sends electrons streaming though logic gates in just such away that, up at your end of things, the show goes on. For thatreason, making a video game is very much about a conversa-tion with the stuff of computation. Developers must think interms of what a computer does well, from tireless repetition toprodigious memory to lightning-fast mathematics. We mustspeak their language.

The term “stuff” is rather hard to pindown, and I don’t plan to try. Anthropologist Daniel Miller(2010, 1), who studies diverse cultural uses of everyday objectsand who literally wrote a book called Stuff, takes the same line.He opens his discussion of the idea with: “don’t, just don’t, askfor or expect a clear definition of ‘stuff’.” And yet, as Miller’swork emphasizes again and again in studies of key artifactsfrom diverse countries, it’s the stuff all around us—from saristo cellphones—that shapes how we think and live.

As games scholars we should ask, is it fair to some game playersthat they are specifically targeted for monetization and personalization?Are existing monetization processes clear and transparent to players? Whattools can be provided to younger and vulnerable players to navigate theconduct and speech they encounter in multiplayer games? Indeed, the complexadvertising infrastructure underpinning many online games, especiallyfree-to-play (Nieborg, Poell, and Deuze 2019), raises many policy challenges.Many European countries policy makers and regulators are asking if gamesare crossing boundaries into gambling and banking

in the absence of any opportunity toacquire stable employment, personify a form of soft capitalism that seemsat once both inevitable and individually fulfilling.As McRobbie (2016) points out, underlying this forced entrepreneurshipis a dispositif of creativity that places all the risk on these mostly youngpeople by holding out an unlikely promise of ‘making it’, of being able to oneday reap the rewards of creativity without having to ask the hard questionsabout sustainable livelihoods.

Our company hosts a game club. Every week we choose a new game,play it for a week and then we get together during a workday to discusswhat it was like. And then we play the next one (Patrik, game designer).

Leo, operations manager responsible for project management and employerwell-being, described the pedagogical value of playing together:When you play a console game and others gather around you, it is interest-ing to see what kind of observations different people make. Some peoplemay focus on a beautiful animation whereas others look at mechanics, orwhatever is their thing. Someone may have special expertise in certainissues and it’s instructive to focus on one thing at the time together.You learn much more than with your own eyes alone (Leo, operationsmanager).Importantly, playing together can help to accumulate shared vocabulary thatis useful when collaborating in game development related tasks. O’Donnell(2009, para. 1.6) uses the term ‘game talk’ when referring to the processthat ‘provides discursive resources for developers when trying to describeabstract concepts like game mechanics’.

I played a lot when I was younger. That’s when it all started. But when Istarted to code seriously at the age of 15 or 16, I played games less. I becameinterested in games in a different way. It was more about dismantlinggames and learning how they worked. Of course, I still try a lot of games,but I don’t necessarily play them for their entertainment value. It’s moreabout research work, has been for the past twenty years. It’s a bit of adifferent starting point compared to actual ‘gamers’ (Hugo, CEO).

Interviewer: Where is the divide between what the teams have to do forthemselves when it comes to marketing, and what you do? Which partof this outreach, marketing, meeting the right people-work is theirs,and yours?Respondent: So, they have to do all the work. I don’t do work for them.I’ll do an introduction, or I’ll tell them something is happening. Atthat point, it’s their choice of what they’re going to do with thatinformation. I won’t hold their hand through the process: I put theimpression in front of them. I led them to the water, they have todrink. And if they choose not to attend the event, and not to set upthe meeting, not my problem. For us, it’s like we’re mentoring andwe’re teaching and we’re providing opportunities, and we’re puttingthe right people in front of them, but we don’t tell them how to runtheir businesses. We don’t own equity in any of the companies, andso, it doesn’t matter what choices they make: it’s not our business.

Thisdelineation of leisure in relation to Arendtian action, regardless of monetaryrecompense, is key to disrupting the work ethic’s compensatory morality,thereby contributing towards the legitimization of basic income.

Reformulating the work-leisure binary is not simply a matter of hybrid-izing polarities into a neologism (Chia 2020). For example, in sociology,the concept of prosumption emphasizes productivity harnessed fromthe rationalization of consumptive practices, while in games research,playbour looks at how digital environments extract commercial value usingtechniques and ideas about play to engage users and workers in repetitive orlaborious tasks (Kücklich 2005)

the past, even though the work itself was routine,workers could gather in the pub at the close of the day to exchange storiesabout their jobs and colleagues, often over a lifetime. In comparison, theNew Economy workplace was increasingly fissured and marked by fleetingand impermanent relations (Weil 2014).

In various countries, it was the student communities,homebrew scenes, and demoscenes that birthed and developed the videogame form (see Jørgensen, Sandqvist, and Sotamaa 2015; Švelch 2018; Swalwell2012). This point cannot be stressed enough: video games, and video gamemakers existed before the video game industry, and ‘amateur-game designis by and large the norm by which game development occurs, and out ofwhich commercial game production continually emerges, reacts and shifts’(McCrea 2012, 179).As a video game industry formalized through the 1970s and 1980s inselect parts of the world, hobbyists and amateur game making activityremained common.

trophies, the effect of these mechan-ics becoming so solidly integrated into videogame culture is that theirgravitational pull changes how games are played and interpreted. Lea-derboards are a clear place where players are compared with one an-other. A former highly competitive Madden NFL player writes thatleaderboards are “a devilish feature,” as they transform “Madden froman escapist pastime into another stage on which to prove your self-worth.”36 Gamerscore is a measure that turns abstract effort in a gameinto concrete results that are intelligible to others at a mere glimpse.

Actually judging skill or effort is ridiculouslydifficult to do, as it necessarily also assesses relative starting pointsand social advantages

The idea of a meritocracy generally concerns social orderand how to allocate resources. Backers of meritocratic norms typicallybelieve that skill should be measured, that effort should be tracked,and that those who demonstrate the best combinations of talent andhard work should rise to the top of the social ladder.

German soccervoted against installing goal-line technology because of cost and theargument by many purists that the inevitable human error is a classicpart of soccer.9 Mistakes ensure debate and discussion, one of the ele-ments that typify reaction to what is often called “the beautiful game.”The central line of appeal by those in favor of using technology insport to double-check human decision is that additional review canmake contests more accurate. Underlying that belief is the premisethat the person or team with the most skill should win and that er-rors in judgment necessarily reward the undeserving.

As Katherine Sierra, awoman who has suffered frequent and sustained harassment, puts itabout technology culture more broadly, “A meritocracy is exactly whatI and so many others believed tech to be. ‘After all,’ I wrote nearly adecade ago, ‘the compiler doesn’t care if the person writing the codeis wearing a black lace bra.’ I was wrong. Embarrassingly, naïvely,wrong. Because while the compiler doesn’t care, the context in whichprogramming exists sure as hell does. To ignore that context is theessence of privilege blindness.”

Theindividual impact on your rating within LoL fosters the perceptionamong some of an “Elo hell” that is “populated by griefers/trolls and‘bad’ players that prevent them from moving up the ranks.”13 A guideto ranked games in LoL contends that Elo hell is a figment of players’imaginations, since “a large misconception is that it is always team-mates that is bringing you down [sic],” and the answer is that “ratingsbecome more accurate the more games are played [sic]. Think ‘big pic-ture.’ It can take hundreds or thousands of games to be consistentlymatched with similarly skilled players.”14 Although incredibly rationaland likely true, this kind of thinking is much harder to remember inthe moment when you believe some other player has cost you some-thing through his or her inactivity or poor performance.

The process turned participation in desired activities intopoints that could then be spent on rewards. Silverman and Simon dis-cuss how some of the best guilds in the world rejected DKP becauseit focuses players on rewards, rather than on group accomplishments

Leveling ensures the appearance that weall start from the same place and then allows us to see how we stackup against other players, as we know they are going through the samethings we are. The status inequality Castronova believes we seek istranslated into a number that grows slowly over time and broadcastsour efforts and skill to everyone we encounter. However, the notionthat we all start from the same place requires deliberate inattentionto the resources players bring to a game in the first place.

one of the cofounders of thegaming site Kongregate, Emily Greer, posted about the harassmentshe has received for her participation in the game industry. Promptedby GamerGate to reflect on the difference between messages sent toher and her brother, she wrote that she had assumed the harassmentshe received was “normal for a co-founder of a game site” and wassurprised to hear that her brother and fellow cofounder did not havethe same experience. Counting up their messages, she found that shereceives about four times as much harassment as her male sibling.

The most frequently cited touch point for GamerGaters was theinsistence that a key part of their movement was about journalismethics.70 The most constructive read of the group is as a consumerboycott of people concerned about journalistic coverage that insultedtheir target audience instead of providing objective coverage of rele-vant news.71 The most common flashpoint in this regard was a flurry ofarticles that appeared shortly after the #GamerGate hashtag was bornthat decried the death of the gamer. The two most widely circulatedand referenced essays were those by Leigh Alexander and Dan Gold-ing.72 The argument about the end of gamers had three key claims.First, video games were reaching a broader audience than ever beforeand, as such, game publishers need not focus on the classic gamer ste-reotypes as their primary audience. This argument largely followed ina tradition of cultural criticism that proclaimed the death of the authoror a variety of other subject positions, and was backed up by data thatclearly indicate the audience of videogame players is far more diverse agroup than the white males of means who match the typical stereotypeof a group of gamers.73 Second, the term “gamer” was at one point akey reclamation of space that reframed people away from being a nerdor some other insulting label into something more positive.

community, fueled by a strong desire to re-tain what already exists. Typically, the cases are carefully swaddled inappeals to skill, to being good enough, and to working hard enoughto make it. All these tropes are at the center of any sort of merito-cratic appeal. If the harassed were tough enough to take it, then theywould be able to reap the rewards of success. Systemic harassment setsthe terms on which players engage, giving stark advantage to thosewho are not targeted and retaining power for those who have alreadyclimbed the ladder.

More recently, the psychol-ogist Paul Piff has conducted research on a modified Monopoly gamewhere one player is given substantial advantages over the other as de-termined by a coin flip at the beginning of the game.113 This experi-ment, in conjunction with other experimental research, leads Piff toan argument that being wealthy affects behavior in profound ways.114Across multiple measures, his research has found that being in a pow-erful position leads a person to be less empathetic, less supportive ofothers, and more likely to ignore structural inequality.

The dominance of Korean players ingames like Starcraft and League of Legends is due in part to the largesystems of support to back them, from state-run organizations like theKorean eSports Association (KeSPA), the large infrastructure and re-wards enabling players to improve, wide broadcasts and support fortournaments, and financial rewards that enable players to focus onplay.106 All of these elements produce a system where some are led tobelieve they are better than others and those who struggle are led tothe conclusion that it is their own personal failing, rather than poten-tial systematic issues that ensure the deck is stacked. Structural fac-tors are occasionally acknowledged—Todd Harper finds that somefighting game players justify certain players’ performance based ontheir “Asian hands”—but these elements are tied to creating an envi-ronment where a particular kind of skill is praised.

McCoy andMajor conclude with the argument that “subtle cues to meritocracyin the cultural environment may encourage members of low statusgroups to construe personal and group disadvantage as deserved andto minimize the perception that such disadvantage is due to discrimi-nation. These system justifying responses to meritocracy cues may bemost likely precisely when individuals would least like them to occur:in the presence of clear, meritocracy-violating inequality.”1

Recent economic analysis in the UnitedStates shows that “even poor kids who do everything right don’t domuch better than rich kids who do everything wrong.”78 As a differentcritique observes, “The truth is that the meritocracy was never morethan partial,” and it goes on to argue that selective admissions systemsat elite colleges ensure some kinds of diversity, but rarely in terms ofeconomic class or parental occupation.79 Colleges in the United Statesalso fail at social status equalization, as getting into and succeedingin college still leads to lesser life outcomes for graduates who happento be black, Hispanic, or raised poor compared to their classmates.80For Jo Littler, meritocracy “functions as an ideological myth to ob-scure economic and social inequalities and the role it plays in curtailingsocial equality.”

Much like a standard-ized test can be hard to see as a problem if you score well on it,video games that cater to one’s own skills, abilities, and habits canbe hard to see as a systemic problem. Hardcore gamers can oftenbe seen calling for more video games that suit them, rather than fordiverse games that draw in more players or test new kinds of skills.The creative director at Ubisoft argues that this predictability andconsistency in video games is “less about familiarity than it’s just en-joying the content.

Instead of developers branching outin new directions, a risk-averse approach to game development anda lack of diversity in the community of people making games cre-ates an echo chamber where recycling content and ideas ensures thatthose who are part of the community already are rewarded and theirsuccess is justified under the guise of merit. Weerasuriya’s positionthat as a gamer he is interested in making “cool things” is not neces-sarily wrong, but it does elide key dynamics of videogame consump-tion and production. Producing the kinds of games he wants to playmeans that he is increasingly speaking to an audience of people likehim, which undercuts any idea of a true meritocracy by building keyassumptions into the “workplace” of games.

Insteadof paying attention to systems and structures, meritocracy emphasizeseach person and what they have done or not, which leaves the priv-ileged left to enjoy their earned status and the unfortunate to blamethemselves for what they lack.A clear place to see this dynamic in video games is to explore thecase of Geguri and her skills at Blizzard’s first-person shooter Over-watch. Rapidly ascending into the top ten players in the world, Geguriwas extraordinarily successful in tournament play but was accused ofcheating because other players thought her aiming was too good tobe done without some sort of assistance.

one of the biggest problems a contemporary defender of a merito-cratic order can see is the fact that parents of means are not willingto let their children fail, even if, by the logic of merit, they should. Atthe point that parents can prop up future generations, skill and effortbecome less relevant than birthright and inherited position, subvert-ing the meritocracy with the very aristocratic dynamics that skill pluseffort was designed to reject and continuing the cycle seen through-out China’s history with meritocracy.

Detailed in a lengthy article by Robert Guthrie,prison servers are described as a “dystopian experience unlike any-thing I’ve ever experienced in a video game.”36 Prison servers, whichare run outside the bounds and rules of the primary version of Mine-craft, work differently than most other instantiations of the game. In-stead of jumping into an open world, on a prison server players startout with just a pick and perhaps some basic gear and must then setout to do hard labor, repeatedly working in stone mines to ascend togreater status on the server. Working hard enough eventually awardsplayers with special titles, privileges, resources, and maybe even a placeon the leaderboard. These servers are funded by donations, so a wayto move up more quickly is to spend money to skip out on the grind,which offers an aristocratic approach for players with means. Guth-rie was surprised to find that players did not object to other playersbeing able to buy their way ahead; instead, they stuck around, “hop-ing for handouts or an opportunity down the road to make their wayinto the upper echelons. Occasional generosity from wealthy playersand lottery-style games seems to be what keeps these players engaged,but there really isn’t a path to the highest ranks without paying realmoney.”

fixing these problems is an issue of design and in-tent, rather than one of management of a community headed off therails. Much like Whitney Phillips argues that the systems and struc-tures are at least as big of a problem as people trolling, meritocraciesencourage norms and behaviors that lead to a toxic environment fortheir subjects and have to be addressed at the level of design.25Beyond Overwatch, meritocracy is also tightly integrated into mod-ern Western business culture, where “stack ranking” employees be-came all the rage at General Electric and then spread throughout thebusiness world. Although the practice is waning in popularity, it stillhas advocates, including prominent technology companies like Ama-zon.26 The logic of ranking employees is predicated on the belief thatbusinesses can readily identify their best and worst workers

Patricia Hernandez breaks the process down in her review ofthe game, noting that, upon launch, Overwatch first awards a “play ofthe game” and displays the player who executed the maneuver alongwith a video clip; then it shows a bunch of statistics from the matchand highlights four of the twelve players in the match for their con-tributions; players are then prompted “to ‘like’ their favorite matchcontributors, and everyone gets to see who got voted the most.”11 Thisis an incredibly meritocratic approach to assessing what happened inthe game, ultimately terminating in a popularity contest.The feature that received substantial scorn upon Overwatch’s re-lease was the play of the game, largely because it takes one momentout of context and then chooses to only celebrate one of twelve play-ers when the efforts of the other members of the team often madethe moment possible.

Embracing meritocracy makes allocating resources seem straightfor-ward: as soon as a system for judging merit is established, it becomeseasy to assess who finished at the top and is most deserving of thegreatest rewards. In addition to its utility in economics, supporters ofmeritocracy argue that it “is considered by many to be an ideal jus-tice principle, because only relevant inputs (e.g., abilities) should beconsidered and irrelevant factors (e.g., ethnicity, gender) should be ig-nored when distributing outcomes. Thus, meritocracy is bias free

Ranking hate speech or trying to assess which oppression is worseis a regressive activity that does not fix problems, but analysis of vir-ulent sexism is perhaps the easiest starting point for a discussion oftoxicity in games. The use of the term “rape” is omnipresent through-out the discussion around games, popping up almost any time certainplayers either win or lose in spectacular, or sometimes even ordinary,fashion.

if you are one of those people with such a degree you still haveninety-three fellow villagers who have not had the same opportuni-ties. If you have access to a computer, you would be one of twenty-twothat do, numbers that are largely matched by the seventeen who areunable to read and write, the twenty-three with no shelter from windand rain, and the thirteen who do not have safe water to drink. At thepoint that you are fortunate enough to be in a position where you canhave the ability, the time, and the resources to read a book about videogames, you are one of a very small group of people in the world withthat opportunity.

The growth in development costs createsa situation where companies betting $100 million or more on a gamefocus more on what has worked than on what could be.Focus on meritocracy reaches beyond the design of games andinto the narrative stories they typically tell. Most major game sto-rylines, from Grand Theft Auto III to Uncharted to Restaurant Story,enable players to grow from a relative weakling into a strong, powerfuldemigod.

Claude, left shot and betrayed by his girlfriend while robbing a banktogether. Claude manages to survive but is captured, placing players ina position where they are alone and on their way to a ten-year prisonsentence for bank robbery. The game’s narrative unfolds from rockbottom for Claude, who transforms into a leader of the underworldwho successfully outfoxes the mafia, a Columbian drug cartel, andthe Yakuza in the space of a few hours of player-led intervention andexploration. By the end of the game, Claude has eviscerated the car-tel and exacted his revenge on both the mafia don who sought to killhim and the girlfriend who initially betrayed him.

To put it in theterms of this book, slow games de-emphasize pressureand emphasize meditation.

As Sarah Sharma argues,5 the speed of one grouptends to depend on the slowness of another. Manualwork takes time, and enjoying chill moments tends to

Boku no Natsuyasumi

Thosewho cannot afford innumerable booster packs, war-game units and paint,role-playing accessories, or many rolls of quarters cannot participate in thesetraditional settings in the same way as those who can. Those who cannotafford innumerable loot boxes, character skins and equipment, or a varietyof in-game resources cannot participate in contemporary digital gameplay inthe same way as those who can. Of course, those who can afford more gamesin any setting can participate in more gameplay.

Game controllers represent a “control technology” and “control revolu-tion” in response to the “crisis of control” resulting from the need to inter-act with digitalized gameplay. Controllers determine how gameplay inputscan be processed and communication reciprocated to make some form ofgameplay possible. That is, controllers are a revolution because we didn’tneed them before gameplay became digital, but also because they mediate,remediate, and make possible familiar gameplay elements, activities, andoutcomes within a digital setting.Bolter and Grusin describe how remediation is “representation of onemedium in another.”10 They write, “Every act of mediation depends on otheracts of mediation. Media are continually commenting on, reproducing, andreplacing each other,”11 or at least are becoming more popular.

swaths of Black communities across Africa, Europe, and North Americamust accept default, white-body-fits-all prostheses if they hope to receive anyat all (figure 4.23).

Kelly Hacker and I described these posts and reviewsabout Rust as expressing a “privilege of rejection,”63 an idea that is similar yetcomplementary to Passmore et al.’s privilege of immersion. We characterizethis privilege of rejection as when (predominantly white-masculine) playersneed not accept—or learn to be neutral about—playing as demographicallyunaligned embodiments simply to participate in the medium of games. Thatis, rejecting demographically misaligned characters has little influence ontheir options of games to play.

Several groups of observations on the presentation of race and gender in games withparametric configuration

players to freely project or occupy diverse or at least undefined racial, gen-dered, or other identities into their gameworlds. However, when these char-acters exist within familiar narrative tropes, a representational landscapedominated so pervasively by white-masculine defaults, or are adopted intowhite families when gameplay begins, certain interpretations become morelikely.

Sexual orientation is challenging to code reliably in any context, for rea-sons described in greater detail by scholars such as Adrienne Shaw and Eliza-veta Friesem. Writing about the creation of the LGBTQ Video Game Archive

The discs and cartridges of digital games, which can also be analogousto collections of physical pieces, can be sold, lent, borrowed, or stolen inmuch the same way. Even when these activities violate terms and condi-tions, for games that are not digitally distributed or networked, such termsand conditions were/are hard to enforce. However, game software and digitalplatforms and their collections of assets and code do not belong to players,and lending or imposing our own terms of use on them is explicitly prohib-ited and technically challenging to implement.

Digital games, on the other hand, have long had issues withfinite life cycles on electronic media, circuit wear and malfunctions, obsoles-cence, and basic technological and/or legal preservation.41 A dedicated collec-tor of older digital games must do more than gather games; ignoring the legaldimensions for a moment, they need to actively maintain a broader hard-ware ecosystem that permits access to those games

The more efficient or forgettable the experience, the morelikely users or players are to assent and move on without considering whatthey have authorized, in a clear demonstration of why the common mantraof interface design discussed in chapter 1 of aiming for unnoticeability canbecome problematic.Optimizing inattention

Start “buttons” are not always literal/physical buttons; they may simply bemenu prompts. These buttons or prompts are a common feature of digitalgames with an incredibly straightforward function. Explicitly, although Iwill not suggest actually, they are the inner edge of the periludic thresholdbecause interacting with them means starting gameplay.

Pagination does not inform readers about textualcontent, but it can influence how they interact with a book. Knowing howmany pages remain in a chapter, for example, can help readers better decidehow best to allocate their time—when to continue reading or when to putthe book down and go to sleep. Even if they provide no information aboutnarrative or other content, completion percentages and similar informa-tion help players make similar decisions about their participation in digitalgameplay—helping prioritize tasks or allocate real-life time.

Play in scientifij ic research is seldom discussed in print. Perhaps wescientists take it for granted. Or maybe we are a little self-conscious andtry to hide it from others. After all, we don’t want taxpayers to thinkthey are subsidizing adults who are acting like a bunch of kids, therebysquandering hefty amounts of public money. Play in science is thus anelusive and difffijicult topic. (Laszlo 2004, 389)There is a great diffference between how science and artefacts are presentedto the ‘outer world,’ and how they are actually produced in workplaces suchas laboratories. This is important to acknowledge if we want to open newpotential for citizen science games. Play is crucial to processes that precedethe formation of scientifijic artefacts, but we, as ‘normal’ citizens, are notsupposed to see this. Playing is an intrinsic part of scientifijic knowledgeproduction, yet it is mostly covered up, or ‘black-boxed’ for outsiders, for thereasons sketched above

Citizen science projects and biohacking activities are both activitiesperformed by non-professionals, artists, or citizens, but with a diffferentmode of appropriation. While the intent of citizen science projects is tocontribute to research experiments and contributors are expected to ‘followthe rules,’ biohacking is a bottom-up movement that is based upon subvertingexisting knowledge structures.

function is both constitutive and symbolic, as instrumentslike microscopy served as “a means to and a symbol of mechanical objectiv-ity” (Daston and Galison 2007, 139). With the microscope as an objectivemediator, scientists tried to eliminate the subject. The epistemic messageof the microscope is a tool for creating objective knowledge. Today, moreinvolvement and subjectivity of scientists in microscopic image productionis common practice. Using software programs to correct, to crop, or to alterimages is a commonplace. For instance, color is often added in order tohighlight specifijic elements of an image.

The focus of this chapter is on ‘activist simulation games,’ which aremotivated by an activist or political intention on the part of the game-maker, and which attempt to harness simulation and procedurality in thegame to convey the maker’s political critique or message to the playingpublic. Schleiner argues that that the ‘toyness’ of the world of such games,the miniature abstraction of the model that announces itself as game,not life, contributes to a nullifijication of the game’s critical impact. Tobreak away from this situation, she argues, requires a ‘broken toy tactic’of interruption or sabotage that breaks the spell of games’ procedural,operational logic.

The brokenness of September 12thmanifests in that playing well delivers loss, subverting the expectationof the player to master a rewarding challenge of eliminating terrorists. InMcDonald’s Video Game, on the other hand, the very operationality of themodel of fast food production cycles transmitted to the player overcomesthe game’s critical impact.

toy-like, cheerful cow and hamburger world that the ironic subtext of thisbeing an unethical business practice is often missed by players. For instance,when my game design students in Singapore played McDonald’s Video Game,they seemed largely unconcerned about the detrimental side efffects of thistype of production on workers, animals, consumers, or the environment.

A tactical recipe for the activist simulation game consists then of twosteps, fij irst a positive, then a negative; fij irst to constructively programa simulation of a harmful operation from the world into the game, fol-lowed up by either a game-maker, or player instigated interruption, orsabotage that breaks the spell of the game’s movement and procedurality,thereby illuminating its operationality in a critical light.

The conventions of a conspiracythriller for example, require that the complexities of a historical situa-tion—such as energy transition—are simplifijied in a kind of morality playin which bad characters (such as Chen and, to a lesser degree, Jack) embodybad behavior, and good people (such as Tony and Vera, unraveling theconspiracy) defeat them in the end.

Impact of different energy sources

petro-capitalist,authoritarian states with a questionable reputation with regard to democracyand human rights. Countries such as Russia, Iran, and Venezuela use theirenergy supplies as a political weapon to defend their strategic interests.

his discoverythat China is indeed delivering weapons to Iran;

To better understand the persuasive power of Collapsus as a whole,we can direct our attention to what documentary theorist Michael Renovcalls “the four fundamental tendencies or rhetorical/aesthetic functionsattributable to documentary practice,” which are to express, to analyzeor interrogate, to reveal, and to persuade or promote (

Collapsus isan important case to discuss because it succeeded—back in 2010—in imagining the social andpolitical implications of global warming in an innovative way. It was aimed at a predominantlyyounger and connected generation. Statistics show that it is difffijicult for documentary fijilms toreach young audiences; only 18-20 per cent is younger than 34 years old. Collapsus reached 41per cent of that age category.

Smaller game jams are occasionally even ‘designed’ and leveraged as toolsfor political participation themselves. For instance, the GeziJam was held inJune 2013 to support and raise awareness of the protesters trying to stall thedestruction of the Taksim Gezi Park in Istanbul. The conceptually related#JamForLeelah reflected on the suicide of Leelah Alcorn in December 2014and challenged participants to tackle the issue of transgender sensibilitiesthrough the creation of games. In some cases, game developers are trying tomonetize this awareness and create games to raise funds for socio-politicalcauses. For instance, the game Kubba was created by Ahmed Abdelsamea(2012), an Egyptian indie designer, to generate revenue benefij iting therefugees of the Syrian civil war (Curley 2012). The game mimics the moreor less iconic Western game franchise Cooking Mama (Offfijice Create 2006),challenging players to prepare the eponymous Syrian dish, Kubba. Thegame is a variation of the earlier Flash game Ta’mya (2012); yet, while theoriginal has English text and is available on Kongregate

The role of intellec-tual property rights has massively increased since the late 1990s.This is no longer just about copyright but huge numbers of pat-ents and micro-patents that cover software, protocols, operat-ing systems, algorithms, data feeds, and so on.64 This allows theplatforms to stay way ahead of smaller, later competitors whohave little chance of reaching the scale of data collection andcomputing power available to the giants. It also allows themto effectively charge “rent” (economic actors receiving rewards“purely by virtue of controlling something valuable”) on thosesystems, platforms, and infrastructures.

freelance, indie cul-tural scenes are slowly disappearing.20It is this that lies behind the growing concern with culturallabour.

It might be that some targeted basic income for artists schemewould work. It is selective and so perhaps akin to a fellowshipscheme. The Irish experiment will tell us a lot here.

In neoclassical and neoliberal economics, state spendingon services is framed as being paid for by the “productive” –i.e. profitable – sector of the economy. But, as we learned inthe pandemic, the most useful and essential parts of our soci-ety are often the least profitable and their workers the leastremunerated. Many profitable sectors are not useful, andoften quite damaging. Large parts of the hyper-profitablefinance sector are parasitic on the public service sector. AsI argued in Chapter 2, this “productive” economy relies on awhole set of disavowed systems – education, domestic labour,environment – without which its profits would be impossible.

More generally, “efficiency” has proved brittlein the pandemic, as “just-in-time” systems with little “slack”shut down rapidly. Resilience and adaptability

The FEC critique the “supply-side” approach to growth, both asineffective in providing these elusive “good jobs” and in assum-ing aggregate GDP will “will lift all boats”. The FEC’s goal is toreorient social and economic policy away from a GDP-centred,individualised jobs-and-wages growth to a focus on guaranteedcollective liveability.It is disposable household income, rather than wages perse, that should provide a key metric.

How, then, do we reassert culture’s role in public policy?Many who seek to give culture a distinct function have beentempted to add it as a measure or priority alongside the “eco-nomic”. Advocacy such as the “fourth pillar” adds culture tothe “triple bottom line” of economic, social, and environmen-tal impact. But simply adding “culture” leaves “economy”unexamined, a “black box”.6 Like many such attempts, it isconstantly surprised when the real bottom line turns out to be“economy” after all. 7 In this sense, we need to challenge what“economy” actually entails.

Humans are subject to these material needs, but their purposeand agency are not set by the imperatives of material survival.The purposes of human lives are set by normative not naturalimperatives. By “ought” not “instinct”. These normative pur-poses, in turn, can be changed in the light of self-reflection.“As distinct from natural freedom, spiritual freedom requiresthe ability to ask which imperatives to follow in the light of ourends, as well as the ability to call into question, challenge andtransform our ends themselves”.28Humans also generate surplus time, after material necessi-ties have been met, but nothing tells them how they ought touse this time. They themselves must decide this. Material andspiritual freedom are inseparable – there is no spiritual realmapart from the material – but they are not the same. Spiritualfreedom is a higher order of freedom; it is dependent on naturebut transcends it. The way we lead our lives is not set by mate-rial necessity but set by us. To which I would add that culture,at its broadest, is the name we give to the collective patterningof our material and spiritual freedoms, patterns based not juston communication – all plants and animals communicate – buton symbolisation, forms of speaking about what we ought to do.

When Indigenous peoples talk about culture, it is ofsomething foundational to their lives, inseparable from them.

This is too restrictive. Without water, one dies in nine days,yet one can live for years without human touch. Is the lattera luxury? Of course, the removal of water, food, electricity, orshelter makes life incredibly difficult very quickly, and it wouldtake some time (childcare issues aside) for the closure of schools,or general health and social services, to register an impact. Butwe all accept these things as part of the social foundations.“Essential worker” is also a contested term

Culture, in both its individual tra-jectory and its social guarantee, is thus essential to the develop-ment of individual capabilities, as in the work of Amartya Senand Martha Nussbaum, and thus an essential part of demo-cratic citizenship, a fundamental human right.

I argue that freedom is as foundational to humans as satisfy-ing material needs

Health, education,housing, transport, food, energy, water, basic communicationsystems – should these not be fixed before we get to culture?1In what follows I make an argument for the centrality ofculture in overcoming the present crisis, and in the followingchapters sketch out what such an agenda might look like. Weneed to acknowledge the “legitimation crisis” to which culture-as- industry was a response – art associated with elitism andpatrician subsidy, the growth of the culture industries

justifies inaction through despair, encouraging usto postpone doing anything until the “big day of revolution”.

Neoliberalism, a distinct phase of global capitalism thatemerged in the early 1980s, is in crisis. The economic, politi-cal, and social solutions it brought to the prior crisis of Fordistsocial democracy in the 1970s no longer work. That muchmight be broadly agreed. It has become ever clearer since the2008– 10 global financial crisis. Stagnant growth, stalled wages,growing inequality, cost- of-living increases, rising indebtedness,increasing precarity of employment, and the erosion of publicservices are the stuff of the nightly news. This is accompaniedby widespread disaffection and disconnection from the politicalprocess, resulting in alternating moments of political efferves-cence (often as anti-politics) and resigned passivity. This in theface of a growing perception of the deepening hold of powerfulelites over the workings of government, in the form of lobby-ing, political finance, corruption, cronyism, the public–private“revolving door”, and a pervasive cynicism towards techno-cratic political expertise

To achieve these goals wouldrequire that we tackle the ownership and control of the culturalindustries themselves

For TimJackson, modern consumerism is a catastrophe, and the soonerwe exit from it the better. Kate Soper, who flags a less puri-tanical approach in her book on “alternative hedonism”, alsosees much of modern cultural consumption as the problem tobe solved.

It accu-mulates rights over protocols, platforms, algorithms, data, andtechnologies, as well as copyright

There certainly are cul-tural industries, the large-scale organised production of culturalgoods and services, and these need to be taken very seriously.But culture is not itself an industry, nor is its function to produce“jobs and growth” or “catalyse innovation”. It is part of ourdemocratic citizenship, an inalienable element of our universalhuman rights, and essential for our reimagining of the future.The key argument of the book is that culture, as an objectof public policy, should be moved out of “industry” and backinto the sphere of public responsibility alongside health, edu-cation, social welfare, and basic infrastructure.

The calls by Williams,Hall, and others for creative freedom, for popular participa-tion, and for democratic control were certainly made againstthe formal official arts system but they went beyond these. Forthem the whole system of cultural production and distribution,including the “cultural industries” and public media, was a keysite of a political struggle for an expanding democratic, socialcitizenship.

That it contributes not just to “mental wellbeing” but is essen-tial to our citizenship, as autonomous, flourishing individuals ina strong democratic polis.Art and culture provide a distinct space in which our individ-ual freedom is facilitated and constantly examined. This free-dom is positive – it is freedom to do, to become – and requires asocial and cultural infrastructure to make it possible. This free-dom is not simply about desires and wants, but about decidingwho we ought to be and what we ought to do. It is ethical orspiritual freedom.

As I argue in the next chapter, creativ-ity as “input” was crucial to how culture was absorbed into alanguage of economy. It was central to the construction of thenew, self-directed subjects of “creative capitalism”, with their“always-on” networked personas and blurred line between liv-ing and working. But creativity was also an answer to art andculture’s “democratic deficit”. If art was seen as elitist

For these, the fetishisation of GDP

The data set is also primarily focused on North American game-makers, as 47 games analyzed were made in the United States orCanada.

At odds with this goal isthe need to document and analyze this work before it dissipates fromonline stores, runs out of stock, no longer works with contemporaryhardware or otherwise becomes unavailable. Anyone who has donethis kind of work recognizes the myriads of challenges indocumenting play and designed play experiences. In this space inparticular, limited budgets, deprecated software (e.g. Adobe Flash)the need to perpetually update hardware and software, and theculling of low volume sales software on app stores all createaccelerated expiration dates. Archiving such work is no longermerely an effort in saving digital files on redundant drives but alsomeans using snapshots of old operating systems and emulatingsoftware environments that are no longer available. It also meansphotographing and playing analog games multiple times to captureelements not obvious about such games.

The chapter contains a content analysis of 50 games by Black gamemakers.

I love thisindustry. I love it enough to have dedicated half my career to it. Ilove it enough to praise it and to tell it when it’s making a mistake.With love comes responsibility - a responsibility to care, appreciateand respect. This book serves as an opportunity to help the gamemaking community grow, reflect, and improve itself.

invoking the metaphorical, Black card, without accepting the rightsand responsibilities therein. It can read as a way of doing providingthe minimally viable product, a representation of Blackness, assubstitute for invigorating the work with authentic Blackness. Tosome it may play as the Cigar Store Indian has, an offense to boththe ceremonial use of tobacco and image of the noble savagecaricature.

Featuring people of color, does not make it agame for people of color, just as wrapping a game box in Africangreen and gold make it more authentic. Such efforts may actuallydo the oppositive, emphasizing their inauthenticity in choices thatare ignorant of authentic blackness (if such a thing exists).

The problem of Mancala, if it can be framed as such, is alsodemonstrated in the research’s slowly antiquating line of thinking.A line of thinking, that has routes in a colonial history valuing theperson who absconded the artifact, over the people who produced it.One that saw a hero in a tomb raider. A culture that sought the onesecret treasure that unlocked some knowledge, provided access to amystical power, and gave dominion over others

examines the historical evidence to“dispel a long-standing belief that so-called complex societies aremore likely to play strategic games” (2021). In that analysis, aresome hints at a larger, problematic, and perhaps systematictendency. The tendency to want to see monolithic pattern, to make ageneral case of a diverse group, or as we more commonly put it –stereotype.

In half a year, the game raised close to half a million dollarsand nearly 250,000 books in total donations that went on to benefit girlsliving in the conditions represented in-game, as well as $160,000 for sur-geries throughout the world.

Balogh’s adoption of not just onebut many racial identities demonstrates the flexibility with which whitepeople take on other identities, often in the name of valuing or “respect-ing” them. This availability, second, underwrites the fluidity of relations ofidentification between white individuals and race, in that, in contrast tothose who are racially interpellated, the basis of these relations is a matterof individual determination; the basis of racial identity can be less a matterof imposed categories than subjective selection. Thereby, third, thoserelations themselves are disposable or, alternately, inalienable.

The argument presented is one that takesits case study from a game that, on top of utilizing “high-tech blackface”as a method of player/avatar interaction, is also filled with a very limitedsuite of racial tropes of Black people, particularly limited to “ghettoized”identities. Leonard’s suggestion is that this leads to players being renderedas a sort of “virtual ghetto tourist” (2004, 4).

game Everyday Racism (Everyday Racism, 2014a,2014b), developed by researchers across several universities, has soughtto address racism

with franchises such as Pokémon and The Legend of Zeldaappealing equally to male and female players (Ito 2011, 97). Since the riseof more gender-inclusive online communities on fannish blogging plat-forms such as LiveJournal and Tumblr, female fans have reconfiguredcanonical narratives to represent their own interests and experiences.

trolls scavenge, repurpose,and weaponizemyriad aspects of mainstream cultur

What does social justice-orientedgame design look like, and how should developers institute it?

“The worst waswhen I won a roll on an item and the guild leader threatened to tear mybreasts into bloody shreds. I met him a year later in person. He was prettyfucking embarrassed and apologized profusely—clearly this wasn’t some-thing he thought was OK when he met me in real life, but it was somethinghe thought was OK in a video game.” Other incidents she recounted weresimilarly repulsive, but her guild did not penalize anyone for their behaviortoward her. Thus, gaming reinscribed misogynistic violence as a regular,everyday behavior—even when players ostensibly knew better.

Theexisting reporting process is a reactive one, where players who witnessanother player breaching official game policy are burdened with the respon-sibility to submit a report to Blizzard Entertainment (ibid.). There is nofurther information provided about how the report is handled after submis-sion other than to say that a Game Master will investigate.

Bloodborne’s narrative details and mechanics are too convoluted, intri-cate, and scattered for any one person to uncover on their own. If you wantto understand Bloodborne, then you must take to its community. A com-prehensive view of the game cannot be accomplished in a single play-through by a solitary player. It takes the collaboration of many playersand their countless, varied, subjective playthroughs to collect and archivethe knowledge necessary to even begin to understand the game.

By regardingplay as an appropriative activity that is situated in subject ivity, identity,and experience, this method expands opportunities for inter sectionalanalysis, illuminates diversities of play styles, and avoids t he reinforce-ment of an essentialist gender binary.

70% (n = 91) of women and 54% (n = 116) of menalso disagreed with the statement that “men in the industry are educatedor informed on the issue of sexism.” Most of the boys’ club atmospherethat women cited as uncomfortable was rooted in unprofessional officeconversations that men were comfortable engaging in

Of all the jobs I have done, this is the most worry-free. It’s allabout playing online games. I play games anyway whenever I havetime, even if it is not for gold farming. Now I get paid for playinggames. This is killing two birds with one stone. What more can Iask for?

How is gold farming any different from deliv-ering box lunches?

embodya post-feminist ethos regarding WIG initiatives. These women’s visibilityin the conservative production culture of gaming places them in a precari-ous position: while they may be the best positioned to champion a feministagenda like ECMGM, they must also navigate potential backlash fromcolleagues, the player base, and other key figures who could threaten theirjob security.

Across industries in the United States,women are more likely than men to work part-time jobs, especially if theyhave children—38 percent of mothers compared to 4 percent of fathers(Allard and Janes 2008). Part-time work, however, is rare in the gamingindustry. As a result, female employees with children tend to take jobs inareas of the industry that offer more predictable hours. While thisresponse to working constraints may enable working mothers to balancework with childcare demands, working part-time frustrates career devel-opment. Part-time workers are less likely to land promotions and raises(Prescott and Bogg 2014)

We all very quickly found that the interface of the Creator Mode wasnot particularly well-suited to creating our missions.

, I do not think that thereis any company on Earth that wants to be known as the one thatprovided a platform for creating a simulator where you forceyoung children to work in factories for ten cents a day.

discussion of Augusto Boal’s (1979) alienating techniques. Frasca writes,“The scene always enacts an oppressive situation, where the protagonisthas to deal with powerful characters that do not let her achieve her goals,”and is “enacted without showing a solution to the problem” (64–65). Inthis method of Forum Theater, the scene is then repeated, and membersof the audience are encouraged to “interrupt the play and take over theplace of the protagonist and suggest, through her acting, thesolution thatshe envisions would break the oppression

if there is to be an ethics based on corporeality that is to be sensitive tosocial justice causes and, indeed, lead toward the fruition of social justice,undoing the distinction between real and virtual is the mostsignificantand important element

n conceptual terms, using the Gamergate example, whenmen come to encounter women in the digital spaces of gaming culture—whether in-game or out-game communication is involved—they arerequired in an ethics of recognition to consider how to treat women in thecontext of scandal reporting/information.

example, choosing one’s Pokémon Go avatar in such a way as to match one’sself-perception of a gendered, racialized, or ethnic body i n terms of avail-able discourses of categorization—alternatively, of c ourse, to provide acounterplay and reflexively choose against the grain (Willson 2015, 20).

Pokémon Go players who have arrived bodily at the same Poké stop, or thosenon-playing bodies we encounter along the way. There is, in this contexttoo, a broader population of bodies that we will never meet and never knowbut who will be affected by decisions both ethical and unethical. This is topoint to the very complex “assemblage” between bodies, gaming, technol-ogies, socialities, and relational engagements that may occur in both localand digitally defined spaces but primarily also outside of it—for example,women who are made vulnerable to violence as a result of the Gamergatename-calling but who themselves are not participants in gaming

This binary informs almost all scholarly writingon games and online play in the context of bodies

radical separationof the body and the mind. This mythical separation, beginning from aCartesian framework

Logged in as “Dead_in_Iraq,” DeLappe types the names of soldiers killed in Iraq, andthe date of their death, into the game’s text messaging system,such that the information scrolls across the screen for all users tosee. DeLappe’s goal is simple: He plans to memorialize the nameof every service member killed in Iraq.

Brianna Wu

In Shaw’s research, finding a place to experience com-munity was more important for queer players than LGBTQ charactersbeing present in the game, and while gaymers didn’t purchase gamesfor queer content, they discussed games where queer content was in-cluded (2012).

The data is also “unfiltered” – partic-ipants’ are less prone to adjusting their responses when voicing theirmomentary thoughts. These responses become a mix of experiences,reflections, etc., making them less linear. However, one weakness withthink-aloud is that the understanding of the responses can be limited.There can be gaps in, or a complete lack of, justifications and reasoning

For this purpose, self-curation can be a better alternativeto memorialization. In other words, the user can be responsible forthe curation of their own legacy prior to death.

As Haverinen explains, RPGstransform an avatar into a character which represents “both the storyof the role-play and the personal interests of the player” (2014a, p. 157).She also states that “the communal spirit is usually strong among play-ers who have played together for hundreds of hours and often evenyears. They have shared their personal lives with each other, and have‘lived’ together in the story they have created for the game”

Sibilla and Mancini (2018) also high-light that identification is increased when players are given the abilityto customize their avatars.Sibilla and Mancini (2018) list two types of user-avatar identification:actualization and idealization.

In-game virtual funerals are a way ofmemorializing this loss.

The in-terview was an in-depth semi-structured qualitative interview conduct-ed in April 2021 via instant messaging

devices like phonesand laptops (2014, p. 129). The data on these devices is frequently in-accessible, for instance due to password protection or because theinformation is scattered across multiple platforms. Nevertheless, thisdata holds material of strong emotional significance for the bereavedor the promise of uncovering new information, causing unnecessaryfrustration or hurt when they cannot be accessed.For this reason, there exists a need for designing hardware and soft-ware that account for a user’s death

Klass et al. (1996) propose the ‘continuing bonds’ model inwhich grief is not perceived in stages but instead it is seen as a rene-gotiation of the relationship the bereaved has to the deceased. Thistheory becomes relevant in the digital age due to an increase in digitaldeath practices that facilitate remembrance and allow the bereavedto maintain their connection

“the Western view ofthe East is greatly influenced by the stereotypical negative images thatHollywood films consistently present”

Web Disability Simulator

Furthermore, having multiple hours of uninterrupted leisure time tospend is a luxury for many. Availability of leisure time interacts withgender, social status and other factors. An analysis by the Office ofNational Statistics (2018) showed that men in the UK enjoyed nearlyfive more hours of leisure time per week than women – a disparity thathas grown wider during the 2000’s. They also found that people wholived alone took more leisure time than people living with children.

Remote playtesting is a potential solution

pos-itivism

Carol Shaw, who createdmany games in the 1970s and 1980s for Atari and Activision, includingVCS Checkers, Qubic, and River Raid (See Fig. 6)

Inthis context, increasingly complex rules or codes of behavior were de-veloped for sport hunting, including rules based in normative ethicssuch as, a hunter who wounds an animal must kill it as an act of mercy;killing a sitting duck is unfair; or hiding out to ambush a creature at asalt lick or watering hole is considered unsportsmanlike. The popular-ity of the sport hunting movement and commercial hunting led to ter-rible over-hunting, which eventually sparked the conservation move-ment

While today game cul-ture, or more specifically ‘gamer culture’ refers to particular sub-set ofplayers of videogames, during the early 1800s game culture referredto people involved in the hobby of hunting for sport (Reynolds, McAl-lister & Ruggill, 2016). Part of what supported the rise of sport huntingas a popular pastime was the development of gun technology

1936 Olympic Games

Some researchers look at someone creating analternative history in a game, like a small country conquering the world,and see it that way. But my argument is that these types of alternativehistory creation, or counter-play, is essentially just replicating the logicof colonialism. You just happen to be the colonizer. Like, let me go con-quer England in the game – it’s still colonialism, right?

It’s literallyabout the colonisation of an entire galaxy. Those types of elements areso prevalent.But then there’s the more obvious ones like Age of Empires. Or, Em-pire: Total War. How these games work, and how they are meant to beplayed, there’s an unavoidable code there.

sages in their artifacts, viewers engage in a decoding process to in-terpret these artifacts. Hall describes three broad types of decodingthat viewers may participate in, even shifting between modes at times.

Two major camps of thought could bedescribed as the prejudice reduction model, and the collaborative so-cial action model. The scholarship on prejudice reduction dates fromthe post Second World War era and centres on individuals in societywho hold positions of power and prejudicial opinions about those theyoppress.

Larocco writes: “[...]empathy is an orientation to the other, one thatattunes to some aspect of the other’s feelings or emotions or thoughts[...] yet which may not engage with the other’s otherness at all. [...]Toput the point succinctly: feeling-with is not the same as feeling-for. [...]Empathy, for ethical behavior, is a crucial intersubjective vocalizer, butby itself as an orientation it may not direct the better angels of ournature to direct action.” (Larocco 2018, 3). Larocco here underscoresthe uncertainty around the potential of this empathic positioning, asthere are many possibilities along a spectrum, all the way from authen-tic identification with another to selective empathy that seeks to mis-construe the other as similar to the self, or identifies only with aspectsof the other perceived as similar to the self.

This perspective on technology as an unproblematic labor saving de-vice fits well with so-called common-sense but wrongheaded ideasabout technologies as neutral tools (see Myth #1) that can smoothlyand easily take on the burden of labor from humans and increase ef-ficiency. This idea has been notably critiqued by Langdon Winner butalso many other scholars of Science and Technology Studies such asBruno Latour (1996) and Susan Leigh Star (1999)

The idea of using an immersive, interactive entertainmenttechnology such as a game or VR experience to ‘change minds’ via em-pathy (which is here understood as an almost involuntary, emotionalresponse) plays into a fantasy that neatly aligns with a privileged posi-tionality, seeking quick, easy, and relatively painless methods of mitiga-tion that fall far short of actual change. Worse yet, these projects aresometime tokenised and held up in hyper visible ways, that signal toothers that change has been achieved, when it has not

The reason-ing may go something like this: if only we can use interactive or immer-sive technology to unlearn prejudice and inspire action, then the hard,painful work of the emotional and intellectual labor of coming to termswith prejudicial beliefs and attitudes could be made easier.

for possession [...] If representational visibility equals power, then al-most-naked young white women should be running Western culture.

UnReal engine(2018), he examines the ways in which the the engine itself communi-cates embedded politics, which it also forces (or at least strongly en-courages) onto designers who work with it.

scanner found at airports today (see Figure 1). This example is dis-cussed in more recent scholarship from Sasha Costanza-Chock (2020),in which they identify the narrow ways the scanner conceptualises the‘normal’ and ‘safe’ human body, marking and penalising those with bod-ies deemed ‘different’ as dangerous, such as trans and disabled people.The capabilities of the core technology of the scanner, electromag-netic waves that bounce off of and detect the surface of the body, areonly meaningful for airport security purposes when put in relation to acomparative set of data marked as “normative” (and therefore “safe”)— and herein lie the embedded politics of the technology.

Winner analyses multipleexamples and ends up concluding that while it may be true that notall technologies have embedded politics, most do, and the question ismore one of degree. One example he looks at is the technology of theatom bomb

Reproduced from Corley and Gioia (2004).

a collection of n soft-ware agents. The minimum size of n required toauthentically represent an actual group of real peopleusing software is a very relevant question, but we will notgo into further detail here

In summary, based on these observations, we believethat artificial societies with their representations of individ-uals, social networks, and the situated environment are themost promising paradigm to support policymaking when itcomes to modeling human behavior in a social contact.

agent-directed simulation that isapplied as a decision support system.

To argue,one speaker in the Russian State Duma compared the lawagainst 'LGBT propaganda' with a “victory on a battlefield”(Meduza, 2022b). In this way, the government erases theOther (the queers) from video game culture by censoring itscontent. And then, it tries to fill the gap with propagandamaterials such as the anti-Western Smuta, the militaristicSparta, private military company promotions, etc.

esthetics (admittedly associated with computer gameculture) to convince fans to join, which, in essence, meansjoining the war in Ukraine.

Although the proposed project was rejected, the caseindicates the state’s interest in specific advantages ofgames and play.

An innovative strategy which hesees, and I affirm, “elides the dualism between tech-makingand spiritual strivings”(ibid).Much of this theorization and ethos hold titles such as“Afrofuturism” (Everett, 2009) or “Soulcraft” (Royston,2022) and valorizes embodied knowledges (Daniel, 2005. qtfrom Royston, 2022) from marginalized or racializedminorities.

Rainbowism or “rainbow nationalism“ (Gqola: 2001,qf Slade 2015) is described as an ‘unintentional‘ act of“invoking the rainbow nation as means of silencingdissenting voices with regards to the status quo in thecountry...[...] and with regards to race and apartheid past“(Slade; 2015: 3). The concept of the rainbow nation;censorship

For me, the task at hand was beyond fighting embarrassment,but finding accommodating tactics to initiate what I called“Incoko” (Dialogue in IsiXhosa language) around the oftenunderplayed and hidden forms of racialized domination in theSA videogames industry. Instead of asking “Who is theoppressor?” I thought it is appropriate for everybody toassume that the scene is already racialized, therefore anygenuine discussion must root from there, as opposed to thedichotomous shaming and defense strategies that prevail inmost settings. This to me is inspired by Boaventura de SousaSantos’s transformative critical tenor that “We don’t needalternatives; we need rather alternative thinking ofalternatives” (2018, viii). That we’ve been asking samequestions, and subsequently proposing redundant andirrelevant solutions for years

I noticed a discomforting sense ofwhite fragility (DiAngelo, 2018); condescension; andinvisibilized power plays in the ensuing emails.

(young) adults, ready to do any kind of work as a refugee,just to escape crippling oppression, thus ridding theoppressive regimes of their dissidents while at the sametime providing cheap workforce for the global supporters ofthose regimes as merely another resource they can exploitas modern colonists, while constantly bringing war to theMiddle East for decades, all in the name of bringingdemocracy – or a fetishized version of it that is advertisedas synonymous with all kinds of freedom and prosperity

“Some peoplesay... I mean our producers...” which shows how media reflectthe opinions of the people who control them.

game gave theplayer “the opportunity to act out popular-culture fantasiesof middle-class youths,” and he also explained that “thereis a sense of the public sphere as a site of danger and awithdrawal from any commitment to political or collectivesocial agency that runs throughout the game.”

then-senator Hillary Clinton(2005) claimed that violent games made children violent(Tassi, 2016), and then-president Donald Trump blamedvideogames as one of the causes of school shootings

Interestingly, in GTA IV,an article on the in-game Internet says, “Long-termhealthcare can put a tremendous strain on finances,” whichreminds us that America might be the land of opportunity butonly until people get sick. In addition, when Roman, Niko’scousin, asks him if he likes America, he says it is allabout advertising, and the opportunities are not realbecause people get in debt for those opportunities and becomea slave for the rest of their lives. Moreover, thedescription of the game on the publisher’s websiteexplicitly states that Liberty City is a nightmare for thepeople who do not have money or status (Rockstar Games,n.d.).

(A) Mentoring and psychological support;

I guess from an outsider’s perspective, when you look forsome materials on women in esports, for work, you havevery few of them.

Most guys, when they see a girl, instantly conclude thatshe plays badly. Even if she’s actually a good player,it’s not enough for guys. If a guy and a girl of an equalskill make a mistake in-game, it’s okay for the guy, ithappens, but in case with the girl, she would do it “be-cause she’s a girl”, and not because even top tier playerssometimes make mistakes. Youtube has lots of fail montagesfrom female tournaments. Why point it out specifically,if any tournament has tons of mistakes.

The attitude to mixed teams among ourinterviewees was also mixed: some highlighted the importanceof training together with men, and playing against men,

Now they are just at different levels.It’s not realistic for women, they just won’t survive. Ifyou remove it now, they just won’t make it at the prolevel, no way.

Most male pros can quit university and dedicate themselvesto their gaming career, while females can not afford this.

distribution of players in CS:GO was roughly 78% men and 22%

women in competitive CS:GO. Their skills are almost nevermatched with equal popularity and, consequently, economicgains, in the established economy of attention. Thiscorresponds to the deficiencies in meritocratic valuationfound in society in general, especially in the USA

Due largely to unwelcoming public reception, all-femaleteams rarely compete with all-male teams in public, and whenthey do, they usually demonstrate lower results. However,if one looks at the average scores of female and male playerswho competed in roughly equivalent tournaments, it becomesmuch more difficult to justify the difference between prizepools. According to in-game statistics, professional femaleplayers are only 7% behind professional male players interms of skill-related metrics

neither be bored nor overwhelmed

Table 1: VUCA, BANI, and RAAT

Accordingto an understanding of violence based on social systemstheory, the concept is neither physically nor structurallypredetermined. Instead, it focusses on the communication ofinevitability when attributing to action.

The result of this mechanic is one which allows players tofeel as if their selections have narrative and ingameconsequences, while subtly rewarding them for makingdecisions which lead to positive outcomes for characters.We defined ‘positive’ here as cessation of engagement withthe slave trade or awareness of their own culpability

Domsch suggests that for game choices to feel as if theypossess meaning, they must rely on three guiding principles:they must feel meaningful 1) by being difficult to achieve;2) by making their relevance ambiguous; and 3) by notproviding full gameplay information to the player, and onlysometimes providing full gameplay information. By presentingchoices with incomplete information, the player cannot applya mechanistic decision-making process to get the idealoutcome, and thus the choice feels more meaningful. Thisforces the player to rely on the game’s narrative structureand its broader fiction.

Meaningfully engaging with a recreated historical space isa very different experience from willingly believing in afantastic or futuristic alternative world. Questions ofhistorical authenticity, accuracy and meaning all arise,particularly with such a sensitive topic as the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Ensuring that every choice issupported by research also leads to a need for design choiceswhich explicitly support player engagement and embodimentin much the same way as a living museum might.

We anticipate that this writing process willcontinue for some time, as our team has committed to ensuringthat communities in Sierra Leone approve of ourrepresentation of what is their cultural heritage andhistory. This is time-consuming but an important act ofanticolonial narrative collaboration.

Tomba and an unnamed woman weredescribed as being leaders of an abortive slave revolt aboardthe slave vessel Robert, captained by a Robert Harding fromEngland. While their attempt was unsuccessful, our teamagreed that it represented African resistance, and shouldbe the key central narrative. We decided that the unnamedwoman should be the same individual as the Temne narrativeguide, who has been reborn and wishes her story to be told.This is consistent with Temne traditions and spirituality

The initial intention behind Bunce Island: Through theMirror was only to produce a high fidelity immersive digitalenvironment

majority Temne and Mende peoples, and the smaller indigenouscultures such as the Limba, Loko and Kuranko. What we seein effect is a complex and varied tapestry of cultures andpeoples into which the European travellers and traderssailed and then settled. Those newcomers intermarried withmany coastal families, and from those unions arose Afro-European families which grew to dominate the coastal trade

In part, this aspirational aspect was due to the financialsituation of the London-based Royal Africa Company (RAC)early on; those responsible for the fort were chronicallyunderfunded and typically owed money, as seen through anextensive correspondence by the chief factor, RobertPlunkett, requesting supplies in the early eighteenthcentury.3 Those who worked at Bunce were isolated by distanceand the time period from close oversight by their companyofficials.

Just 502.9 metres by 106.7 metres (1650 feet by 350 feet),the island is small, which made it attractive to the slavetraders intending to build a fort there. Local accountsdescribe how Tasso was the first site considered for a slavefort, but proved unsuitable due to the breadth of terraininto which an escaped slave could flee. Bunce was thereforedeemed a better site and had the advantage of lying justbefore the point where the river grows too shallow for deep-water vessels to navigate.

literature on this complex relationship andsystem

Webegan to ask questions like in what type of homes thesepeople might live in. Would their homes be made of stone orof wood? What kinds of stone would they have chosen? Howmight they dress?These questions, distinctly practical, sparked others, andthe close re-reading of traveler accounts began to shedlight on new ideas and problems. Anna Maria Falconbridgedescribed orange trees at Bunce Island in the 1790s; werethese planted deliberately to address scurvy on board slaveships? Falconbridge describes seeing these trees growingnaturally along the shores of the rivers she and her husbandtraversed in the estuary, indicating that these oranges werea native variety.

And one of themost outstanding examples for this kind of interaction isQAnon, an alternate reality game if you will.